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as husband and wife.
    One night Jock caught Rose and me emerging from rooms above a pub on High Street, in front of a pharmacy that’s no longer there called Saxon Chemists. Jock was with Sheila; clearly they’d been doing the same thing and probably a lot more. “Damn you, Chapman! Where have you been with my sister?”
    Jock was a skilled amateur boxer. In a flash his fists went up; I tackled him to keep him from swinging. The scene devolved into low burlesque, with the pair of us crashing together into the rows of bicycles parked along the pavement while our young ladies beat upon our backs with their handbags, clamouring for us to stop. Two policemen pulled us apart. Jock was hauling Rose away. She jerked free. “Piss off, Jock!”
    She crossed to me; I took her under my arm.
    Jock goggled in consternation. “Bloody hell, Rose! Is this the kind of language you’ve caught from him?” He glared at me. “What have you to say, you damned sod?”
    I took a breath. “Your sister’s with me, Jock. That’s it.”
    Rose’s arms tightened round my waist. I had never been happier in my life.
    For months, Jock wouldn’t speak to me. This was at the moment in Stein’s scandal when the college was physically evicting him. I had read Stein’s novel by then. When Stein left for the army, I took it upon myself to see the book published, if I had to bring it out myself, hand printed and hand bound. Rose backed me up. We spent days at a time in London, resubmitting the manuscript to every house that had turned it down. An editor at Lion’s Gate mulled it briefly, imagining war breaking out and Stein dying as a hero. Novels by gallantly fallen authors sell better. “We’ll speak to Stein,” said Rose. “Perhaps we can arrange to have him catch it precisely upon date of publication.”
    Rose was living at home then. Her father, a Territorial Army colonel, took a dim view of her liaison with a penniless, academically faltering university student. He ordered Rose “confined to quarters.” She sneaked out anyway. We’d meet in tube stations and news arcades, riding for hours on buses or the underground. Just before the autumn term, Rose left school and moved out on her own. She found a flat at Shepherd’s Bush and a job in a print shop. “It’s positively Dickensian.” She loved it. We planned to marry. I was set to return to Oxford. Then came 1 September 1939.
    Hitler invades Poland! Two days later the nation was at war.
    There was no question but that I would enlist. What astonished me was the intensity of my reaction. At once, all clouds lifted. Clarity returned. I loved Rose and I was going off to fight. The only question was where to enlist and in what capacity.
    Of all people, it was B. who decided my course—the unfortunate fellow whose infatuation with Stein had kicked off this whole debacle. He had come to Stein at the height of the scandal and apologised. Astonishingly, he and Stein became friends. I liked him too. It was B. who suggested that he and I enlist as private soldiers. We drove to the recruiting station in Kensington in the rain in his ’32 Standard. B. was ecstatic. “Tell me, Chapman, do you feel as I do? I’m overwhelmed by relief. I feel as if I’ve been waiting for something all my life and now it’s here.” This was the moment, he declared. “History. Great events.”
    At Kensington, the various regiments had set up tables on the pavement under awnings, each manned by a senior NCO and each with a queue of young men waiting before it in the rain. B. went straight for the Royal Marines. I set out seeking the Staffordshire Yeomanry, in which my father and uncles had served. The recruiting sergeant informed me that a young man with my qualifications, that is, more than two years of university, would be enrolled at once in OCTU and sent straight to Sandhurst. This, I